


Erosion

by herbailiwick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Royalty, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 13:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3611934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herbailiwick/pseuds/herbailiwick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For rosworms, who prompted: "Sambenny where Benny is the bodyguard for Prince Sam and Sam hates it and hates Benny at first because he just wants to go off and do his own thing. Sam tries to lose Benny, tries to piss him off enough to quit, anything to get away... but Benny just doesn't lose his cool and is more and more amused by Sam's antics until eventually they just somehow end up kissing."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Erosion

The air is too wet, the wind too chilly, his boots too fancy, but he doesn’t care.

Movement is a requirement sometimes. Freedom. It had been his brother’s goal once too, though not anymore.

He nearly runs into a brother and sister fighting with sticks in the lane. He pauses briefly in case they are going to look up and wish to speak to him. They’re too engaged in the game, though. He’s getting better at blending in. That, or their game is particularly good.

Sam wishes to see which child will win out because it’s very close, but he sighs and moves ahead again in his purposefully common clothes. He needs to move. He needs to flow and to dart and to watch, so stuck as he’s become lately in stiff routine.

There were a lot of times growing up that Sam had wanted to curse the fact he was the younger brother and not the heir, since their father would rarely look his way, but reality had soon caught up with him and made it clear that he was freer than Dean would ever be again. Not that Dean seemed to mind very much. 

Sam still wasn’t being trusted with much, and now that their father was well and buried, all he wanted to do was wander, trying to find…something he didn’t have. He had a lot of stuff, but nothing that seemed to really matter, especially now that Dean was king and kept trying to bring him back home.

The lake is wide, the trees closest providing too much shade in the too-wet air, but, still, he breathes deeply. His chest aches, the cold entering it compounding upon the ice in his heart that still remains, even with John well and buried.

He jerks at the touch of the strong hand. “Benny,” he bites out, glaring over. He’s known Benny for just shy of a year. A friend of Dean’s from one of his more recent expeditions, one Sam has no reason to trust except Dean’s say-so, and Dean’s say-so has meant less recently than it did when they were young enough to still be fighting with sticks and not with the tactics of adults who were tutored in tactic upon tactic as very young children.

He doesn’t move the strong hand, and it lingers there. 

“You can’ tell me you don’ feel that.”

Sam blinks. He doesn’t know Benny well enough to know what he means. 

There are rumors about Sam. Most of them are true. He disrespected his father. He’s going to disrespect his brother. He’s not honorable. He’s not a noble. He’s not fancy, or as handsome as Dean, in fact, Dean calls him ugly sometimes. 

He’s interested in men sometimes. Especially when he was younger, when the spring breeze drew his gaze as easily as it drew the petals of flowers and he would watch and wonder. They won’t stone him for it, but it certainly won’t gain him much favor in the eyes of those who are supposed to matter.

“Feel what?” Sam scoffs. He feels. The stillness of Benny, the warmth in that hand he believes can cut through common fabric and sustain him even though that’s the last thing he should want from Benny, _Dean’s_  Benny. 

“It’s too cold,” Benny declares. “Let’s quit the cat and mouse today, hm?”

He’s so big, so rough for a Frenchman. 

Sam turns so his expression will be seen and respected. “Benny,” he says.

Benny hesitates at the shift, knowing he works for the king but that if Sam really wanted to get away, he’d probably have to let him, or maybe…maybe he hesitates for a different reason. Maybe it’s a cultural thing Sam wouldn’t understand.

“Don’t ever touch me again,” Sam grits out. 

The hand is slow to release him. The cold sweeps in where the pressure and presence of it had sat to entomb him again, like his cold, cold father lying in the ground forevermore.

Dean looked like their mother, the jewel of the entire countryside. Sam tried to be graceful, tried to shine. Everyone still commented on how very like his father he was. They would never stop, it seemed. Now they did it every time they brought up his father’s passing.

“Then you lead the way,” Benny says with a gentleness Sam isn’t used to from him. Sam turns away again. He doesn’t want to look at that disgusting ogre of a man with his fire missing. Where was the usual ferocity?

Sam kneels down by the edge of the lake. 

Benny doesn’t expect him to kneel down by the lake like a child, but his reaction is to not react. He stays still, stands his ground. The breeze blows on, collecting the coolness from the surface of the water.  _Cold_ , it murmurs in Sam’s red-tipped ears. _Cold. You’re going to be a statue, a gargoyle._

Sam glances back over his shoulder at Benny furiously. _That_ man is the gargoyle, the soft-palmed taxidermy bear, the gigantic iron shield, the wicked horse that bucked Sam off once and since he’d come so close to dying he had been afraid of riding it or any other horse ever since.

Benny disliked being stared at, Sam had discovered early on. It made him shift on his feet, though it never made him leave.

Sam turned back toward the lake and dove in, slunk in, sinking, bobbing low.

The cold froze his heart, his lungs, turned him into a sick gargoyle for a moment before he finally surfaced and waited for his body to pull in his next breath.

Sam fully intended on swimming out further away from the shore, no matter how childish that seemed, but before he knew it that strength he wanted to get away from had found him yet again and was tugging him out.

He fought. He tried to pull away, breath shuddering. He cursed Benny’s name, cursed his family, but Benny pulled him out all the same. Sam sat at the edge of the lake with wide eyes, that fire that had left Benny now filling him even more fully, and seeping back into Benny’s eyes too which was, to be quite honest, a triumph, especially in such triumphless times.

Benny cursed him out in turn, voice calm though his eyes were perfect and angry. He led a soaking wet Prince Sam back to the nearest coach, paying extra for their fare as Sam huffed and wondered if he might catch ill and have to stay cooped up even more unfairly.

***

“You can’t confine me to the castle, Dean,” he says, bored. “You won’t even be here.”

“Benny will be.”

“He’s _your_ bodyguard,” Sam protests.

“My favorite, but not my only. Besides, you wanna join Dad?” Dean says, and the guilt feels the way the water had just a day before. Sam sniffs, rolls his eyes at himself. His arms find each other, wrapping in front of his chest. It’s bad enough he’s being waited on by a nurse. To be stuck with Benny, like he can’t live up to what he’s supposed to be? Unacceptable. 

Sam rests until he knows Dean is already well on his journey, past the point at which he’d want to turn around. He slips out the usual way, hiding from Benny an art form already. He doesn’t go far. He sits out near the front gate and watches the sun as it sets.

“No adventure today?” Benny teases. 

Sam jumps. He frowns, hard. His head is pounding and he doesn’t need Benny there while he’s trying to contemplate.

Or trying to disappear.

“I wouldn’t have dove in if you hadn’t been there.”

Benny sobers up. “Hey. I didn’t know if you could swim or not.”

“I’ve _taught_  people how to swim.” Servants, really. It’s always servants.

“You wanted to scare me,” Benny says. There it is. Sam’s embarrassed at the spark between them, that anger, that energy, but it’s better when it’s there than when it isn’t. When it isn’t, everything is too boring and he can’t do boring right now. He _so_ can’t do boring that he dove into a cold lake to prove a point. Or something.

"And you did,” Benny says, and Sam glances over. Benny sits down on the stone step next to Sam.

“Scare you?” Sam scoffs. “Look, okay, if I would have drowned, Dean would have understood.”

Benny’s eyes blaze. Sam is startled. He’d been trying to calm the man. “Benny,” he tries.

Benny is wrapped all the way around him somehow. The warmth takes so long to seep in this time. He’s shocked, but somehow this seems right, it seems _Benny_. 

“Leave me alone,” Sam says. He doesn’t move a muscle. He hardly breathes. His instinct is to get away, as it always is. 

Benny’s voice is low and serious, and it gets muffled against Sam’s too-fancy jacket. “If you think the only reason I’d be afraid you’d drown is cause _I_  might die, they did a terrible job buildin’ up your royal ego.”

Sam relaxes, finally. He floats in Benny’s grip, which is still tight, still…warm. Like a nice bath.

“Tell ‘em to draw me a bath,” Sam sighs.

Benny doesn’t move for another minute or so, just gripping Sam. When he finally does let go, he’s got tear-clouded eyes. “Don’t you think I like chasing you down?” he asks.

Sam pulls away, pushing himself to his feet. Benny is disgusting. They’re practically like two warring countries, and he has the gall to say he enjoys it.

Benny looks up from down on the ground. He’s damp-faced, actually crying. “Don’t you think it’s like an adventure for me? Day-in and day-out? What would I do if you didn’t run off like that? What would I do all day when there’s nothin’ going on?”

Sam blinks. “You could just enjoy the castle. Read a book or something.” He can barely see Benny anymore in the fading light.

“No, I couldn’t.” The indignation is back, and Benny’s standing, and he’s off the step while Sam’s on it so Sam’s even taller than usual, and he gives Sam a little shove. “Inside. I’m drawin’ the bath myself.” 

“We have people for that.”

“I’m doin’ it myself.”

“No,” Sam says, but he goes when he gets nudged forward.

“I’m gonna wait on you tonight, and until Dean gets back.”

“Ew. No.”

“I’ll ask the nurse what she thinks.”

The nurse, harboring a huge and obvious crush on Benny, would think it was just fine. Sam huffed.

“He has more fun with you than he does with me,” Sam says from the bath as Benny sits on a stool closer to the wall than to the tub.

“Not true.”

“He would rather spend time hunting with you than with me. He told me,” Sam says, shivering a little before slipping down in the hot water some more. 

“He’s an idiot, then. You look cute in your gear. And you bite your lip when you aim an arrow.”

“No, I don’t!” Sam protests. 

He absolutely does. He’s been told so many, many times. 

“When you get your health back, I’ll take you hunting.”

“I can hunt on my own!” 

“Dean says you can’t.”

“Dean’s an idiot! You said so yourself.”

“Touche. But, look. I’d like to.”

Sam shuts up. He has to think about it, has to decide whether what Benny is suggesting could even be possible. Who would _want_  to hunt with him, when not even Dean wants to anymore?

Benny looks pointedly away when Sam gets out of the tub, though he helps dry Sam off. 

Oh.

Sam sighs. “You want my body,” he says aloud, like there’s anything proper about that. Not that he and Benny have ever been anything close to proper when it comes to interacting with each other.

“You didn’t know?” Benny raises a brow. “Thought I was pretty upfront about it.”

Sam’s so disappointed. He shrinks into himself again, shivering, damp. He hugs the towel around him and presses a little closer into Benny’s touch. Maybe…he could at least do some good for someone in that realm.

Benny sighs, breath warm against Sam’s cheek. He tucks Sam in close, resting his head in the crook of Sam’s neck.

Sam shivers again. He’s not sure it’s a good shiver. Maybe it is. Well, he’d probably know for sure if it was, if it was.

Sam turns in the towel, in the strong arms, leans down slightly for a soft kiss. His lips are trembling too.

Benny pulls back from the kiss, but he pulls Sam in closer. “Only when you’re ready,” he comments.

“Let’s do this,” Sam swallows. “I’m not _very_  ill.”

Benny eyes him sadly. “Your health ain’t what worries me. It’s your picture of yourself that worries me.”

There’s that guilt. Sam is awash, is far away, but those hands anchor him so he stretches out between far away and close to shore.

“I like the thrill of the chase because my target is you. The way you talk to me, challenge me, is what I want.”

“I like it too,” Sam blurts out. He leans in for another quick, desperate kiss.

“Shh,” Benny murmurs against his lips. “Let’s get you warm,” he says. “Let’s get you warm.”


End file.
